I've been having some issues with my AdSense account for quite some time now. It looks like it's activated but every time I try to connect it with blogger, I get an error. There is no additional description to this error and I can't find any reference on the Web about it.
Finally I decided to contact support so I composed a lengthy report to Google last week, asking them to have a look into my account. Maybe there is some problem with it. So far I got no reply from them and I am a bit disappointed by the lack of response from Google on this matter. A while ago I had some issue with my Google Wallet account, so I contacted support. In less then half an hour, I got a phone from Google and everything was sorted out. I was presently surprised with the patience they had.
Since I got no update on my support so far, I asked my girlfriend to let me us her Google account and create an AdSense account. I linked my blog to her new account and now I am waiting for approval. According to the message that appears on AdSense, this can take up to a week.
Fingers crossed that everything will be sorted out and I can start displaying some of those annoying adds ^_^
Sunday, May 31, 2015
Thursday, May 28, 2015
MyAnthem development - Progress report 2
It's been almost a year since I finished the development of MyAnthem and I'd like to summarize my experience so far.
The development team consisted of two people. I did the entire coding part and a friend of mine took care of graphics, general aesthetics of the app and social media presence. All in all we spent about 5-6 months building the app from scratch, without any previous experience in Android development. There's still a feature or two that I'd like to add to the app but I couldn't find the necessary motivation to start working again, even if I started coding one of the features already one or two times.
Overall things are not looking as good as I hoped. The app had little impact on the market and it generated less then 5 euros from ads. The total number of downloads shown in Google Play Developer Console is around 700, with a retention rate of around 20%. Using Google Analytics I see that the activity is rather steady, 400-500 sessions every month. In the beginning the session number/month was below 200 this but has increased steadily and for the past few months has remained to this figure.
Regarding marketing and promotion, in the beginning we focused on a strong social presence and an 50 euro ad campaign on Facebook. The app has it's own web page www.myanthemapp.com, Facebook account, Google+ account, Twitter account and YouTube channel. We even made a promotional video and published it on the YouTube channel. On Facebook we started a campaign called Anthems Around the World. The campaign consists of a series of "Did you know" cards with interesting facts about various national anthems around the world. Periodically posts were published on app's page on Facebook wishing Happy National Day to various countries arround the World that were celebrating in that day their National Day.
So far we only had one review published on Recovery-Android.com, even if promotional emails were sent to several online publications.
All in all we gained a lot of experience from working on this project, even if it didn't catch the expected attention on the Google Play Market. The entire concept had a very limited audience, because let's face it, who listens to National Anthems these days?
Looking forward to finding an idea that is worth turning into an Android Application!
The development team consisted of two people. I did the entire coding part and a friend of mine took care of graphics, general aesthetics of the app and social media presence. All in all we spent about 5-6 months building the app from scratch, without any previous experience in Android development. There's still a feature or two that I'd like to add to the app but I couldn't find the necessary motivation to start working again, even if I started coding one of the features already one or two times.
Overall things are not looking as good as I hoped. The app had little impact on the market and it generated less then 5 euros from ads. The total number of downloads shown in Google Play Developer Console is around 700, with a retention rate of around 20%. Using Google Analytics I see that the activity is rather steady, 400-500 sessions every month. In the beginning the session number/month was below 200 this but has increased steadily and for the past few months has remained to this figure.
Regarding marketing and promotion, in the beginning we focused on a strong social presence and an 50 euro ad campaign on Facebook. The app has it's own web page www.myanthemapp.com, Facebook account, Google+ account, Twitter account and YouTube channel. We even made a promotional video and published it on the YouTube channel. On Facebook we started a campaign called Anthems Around the World. The campaign consists of a series of "Did you know" cards with interesting facts about various national anthems around the world. Periodically posts were published on app's page on Facebook wishing Happy National Day to various countries arround the World that were celebrating in that day their National Day.
So far we only had one review published on Recovery-Android.com, even if promotional emails were sent to several online publications.
All in all we gained a lot of experience from working on this project, even if it didn't catch the expected attention on the Google Play Market. The entire concept had a very limited audience, because let's face it, who listens to National Anthems these days?
Looking forward to finding an idea that is worth turning into an Android Application!
Friday, August 08, 2014
MyAnthem development - Progress report 1
It's been over two months since I began working on MyAnthem app for Android and I thought to summarize the progress.
The app has already 10 Alpha versions published on Google Play and most of the main features are already implemented. Not all versions were successful, there have been 3 or 4 who crashed. I still remember my first version which crashed, which brought me a real adrenaline rush during a Saturday morning. It turned out the bug was really easy to fix, it was a global define I forgot to update.
Being my first application on a new platform, the development time takes long. I had to start from zero with every single feature, researching, understanding, implementing and debugging it. Even the development and release work-flow I had to define and get used to it.
The biggest time consuming step in implementing a feature is not the actual coding part, but the research involved in understanding it. I usually have between 5-20 tabs open in Google Chrome every time I finish implementing a feature, not to mention the ones I closed to save RAM. Eclipse and Chrome can eat up a lot of RAM and the 8GB that I have on my laptop are not enough most of the times. Most usefull websites so far for researching were stackoverflow.com and Android developer. If the Android developer gives an overview of the feature, StackOverflow helps me find out solutions to various problems that others have faced. I've reached now 37 consecutive days when I visited StackOverflow and the way it goes, I'll probably get my first gold badge soon :)
Features available in the app:
The app has already 10 Alpha versions published on Google Play and most of the main features are already implemented. Not all versions were successful, there have been 3 or 4 who crashed. I still remember my first version which crashed, which brought me a real adrenaline rush during a Saturday morning. It turned out the bug was really easy to fix, it was a global define I forgot to update.
Being my first application on a new platform, the development time takes long. I had to start from zero with every single feature, researching, understanding, implementing and debugging it. Even the development and release work-flow I had to define and get used to it.
The biggest time consuming step in implementing a feature is not the actual coding part, but the research involved in understanding it. I usually have between 5-20 tabs open in Google Chrome every time I finish implementing a feature, not to mention the ones I closed to save RAM. Eclipse and Chrome can eat up a lot of RAM and the 8GB that I have on my laptop are not enough most of the times. Most usefull websites so far for researching were stackoverflow.com and Android developer. If the Android developer gives an overview of the feature, StackOverflow helps me find out solutions to various problems that others have faced. I've reached now 37 consecutive days when I visited StackOverflow and the way it goes, I'll probably get my first gold badge soon :)
Features available in the app:
- Activity displaying the list of countries for which the anthem is available
- Activity displaying anthem detail
- Integration and usage of SQLite database
- Instrumentation with Google Analytics
- In-App Billing
- In-App and interstitial ads
- Anthem download and possibility to interrupt the download
- Country Flag zoom
- Anthem playing
- Notifications in the status bar
- Search functionality
- Sharing
Even if I don't expect to earn much with this app, the things I learned about Java, concurrency, file parsing and Android Development are enough to keep me motivated to continue.
There are still a few features left to work on and a careful analysis and of the graphics and general UI of the app, so stay tuned for future updates.
In case anyone wants to become a Alpha tester, here is the link to MyAnthem
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